The Invisible Line was more about the phenomenon of actually crossing the "race line", families changing from black to white, than about "pretending" to be something else. Sharfstein makes some really interesting points about what it means to be black, white, or somewhere in the middle (usually referred to as "mulatto" in the book), and the stories of the three families that he uses illustrate the difficulties in trying to establish a rigid disti...

Even though I've heard a lot about how fantastic Beloved is, I never really knew what it was about, even when I decided to bring it home for the read-a-thon a few weekends ago. I knew vaguely that it had to do with slavery and racism in the United States, but somehow I had missed out on the dead-baby-haunting-her-mother's-house part.
How did I miss that?...

What the synopsis doesn't tell you is that Jay is an African-American man who saves a white woman from drowning in the bayou in a very poor, very black neighbourhood, and that she refuses to say anything to him, his wife, or the boat's driver. It also doesn't tell you that Jay has a history in the Black Power Movement, and that this history is a very important part of the story, its effect on him (and some of the other characters) a key character...

I'd heard lots of good things about The Book of Negroes, and have contemplated borrowing it from my library at school to read, but hadn't gotten around to it yet, so I decided to select it as the first audio book that I would try out.
It did not disappoint....

Sentences tells the story of Percy Carey (aka M.F. Grimm) from his perspective, as he lives in the world of American hip-hop and street crews. It's a really good look into the mentality behind the people who get involved in that kind of lifestyle, and why they make the choices that they do....

I decided to read this series after going through all of the books in Hamilton's Anita Blake series. I knew going into the series that this one would have more sex in it than the early Anita Blake books, and I'm going to reiterate that to anyone who reads this. This isn't the series for you if you don't like reading erotica. Seriously....

Fallen in Love doesn't really fit in the flow of the rest of the series, since it's written from the perspectives of people other than Luce, but then it also sort of does fit. It's about love stories, but not the same way that the rest of the books are. With the exception of the last story, all of them are about other characters in the series, and it's fun to see them in their own contexts, to learn more about how they act and feel....

I heard a lot of good things about this series over the past few years, and I finally got around to reading it for myself. I didn't really know what to expect, just that it was a teen romance and that it included fate and angels....

Let's start with the positive. I loved the alternating narrators, switching off between Aimee and Alan's points of view. It was cool to get inside both of their heads and see the events of the story from more than one perspective, especially since so much of the conflict is internal. I also really liked the concept of the story, the attention to detail in the background of the setup - like the pieces about Aimee's mother - and the inclu...